Peak Bed-Stuy moment. Got the cops called on me for buying dog poop bags!

I was walking my dog on Fulton near Throop - he poops, I realize I forgot bags. I ask around “anyone have a plastic bag?”, but no one answers. Instead, a woman literally watches the whole thing and started aggressively yelling at me. I said, “I’m running into the dollar store to grab some.” Mind you, the door to the dollar store is literally 10 feet away.

One minute later I’m at the register holding the roll when two NYPD officers walk in. Someone reported “a white woman leaving dog waste in the street.” Yep. That fast.

I walk back out, pick it up, and there she is across the street, laughing in her car, yelling “Keep our neighborhood clean!”

Ma’am. I was in the act of keeping it clean. You just chose chaos.

It’s wild. I get the gentrifier vs. longtime resident tension, but calling the cops on someone visibly doing the right thing after making an honest mistake? That’s not community pride, that’s theater. Community pride and keeping the neighborhood clean would have been showing some basic decency and helping me.

Anyway, shoutout to the officers for not dying of secondhand embarrassment. Add this to the growing list of “only in NYC” stories where you can’t win even when you’re trying to do the right thing.